Making the administrative records of HIAS available to the public

Month: April 2017

The HIAS archive project is twofold in nature. The first part–the part this blog is concerned with–relates to the processing of HIAS’ last 40-50 years of administrative files. The second part has to do with improving access to case files regarding those assisted by HIAS between the Second World War and the turn of the twenty-first century.

To handle the second part of this project we hired a database manager, Janet Yerokhina. Her job is to determine how to pull a massive amount of data stored in multiple formats into one database. Janet has been extracting and cleaning data, and creating a search screen for the public-facing interface. When completed the database will include fields of information about tens of thousands of HIAS clients.

This HIAS client registration card is one of the many formats Janet worked with in creating the the database.

As Janet went through the thousands of client files recovered from an old, out of date HIAS database, she would sometimes check for familiar last names. For, Janet and her family were HIAS clients themselves in the 1990s as they emigrated from Russia to the United States. One day, Janet came upon her mother’s fairly unique first name, followed by their surname, their first address in New York City, and information regarding other family members.

Part of the American Jewish story is one of immigration, so how fitting it is that a staff member of the American Jewish Historical Society should find her own story in our holdings.

Janet is still perfecting the database, but you can check it out here.

As a note, because much of this data is confidential and restricted, only certain pieces of information will be publicly available.